[whatwg] embedding meta data for copy/paste usages - possible use case for RDF-in-HTML?

[Lachlan Hunt]

Hallvord R M Steen wrote:
> 2009/1/20 Jamie Rumbelow <jamie at jamierumbelow.net>:
>> I think that the already available solution to your problem are Microformats
>> - you are essentially embedding metadata, semantically in HTML.
> 
> Of course, but I think your comment misses half of the proposed
> solution.. namely what format the UA puts the information on the
> clipboard in.

Determining how one application passes information via the clipboard to 
another application seems very much out of scope of HTML.  If there was 
such a method available, then we could investigate how to obtain the 
relevant semantics from the document.  But we can't do that until there 
is some clipboard format available for this purpose that other 
applications can understand.

I doubt that it would be possible to create some generic format that 
would be suitable for such a wide range of use cases.  For an address 
book application, the most sensible approach would be to add a vCard 
format (text/directory;profile=vcard) to the clipboard.  Given that many 
address books already support the vCard file format, it's not such a 
stretch to believe that they could read the data in that format from the 
clipboard.  The problem is getting them to support an import from 
clipboard feature.

However, other use cases, like pasting a quote into a word processor 
complete with bibliographic information, would need an entirely 
different format.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt - Opera Software
http://lachy.id.au/
http://www.opera.com/